"Writing the Self: Selected Works of Doris Lessing"

Lynda Scott
Department of English
University of Otago
New Zealand

Deep South v.2 n.2 (Winter, 1996)

Copyright (c) 1996 by Lynda Scott, all rights reserved. This text may
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Critics of Lessing often discuss her fiction within its psychoanalytical
and Jungian frameworks and focus only on specific textual details
such as the dreams of the protagonists. While this method centres
on the characters' quest for selfhood, critics have not fully
applied a psychoanalytic approach to her self-representational
writing, which is also a quest for, and construction of, selfhood.
In this paper I will discuss the links between psychoanalysis
or psychotherapy and self-representational writing with specific
references to The Golden Notebook, The Diaries of Jane
Somers, a selection of her autobiographical essays, and Under
My Skin, part one of her autobiography which was only published
in 1994.

I examine Lessing's notion of "selfhood" through
these novels and alongside her autobiography proper because Under
My Skin is, I believe, an example of what postmodernist theorist
Linda Hutcheon calls historiographic metafiction.(1) If indeed
any autobiographical enterprise involves the self-conscious and
deliberate textualisation of oneself and the creation of a "fictive"
construct, Lessing deliberately posits fiction and truth as two
sides of the same coin. Linda Hutcheon defines historiographic
metafiction as "offered as another of the discourses by which
we construct our versions of reality", arguing that "both
the construction and the need for it are what are foregrounded
in the postmodern novel". In this paper, I do not, however,
seek to allow "autobiography" to collapse completely
into the genre of fiction, but rather, to highlight the "autobiographical"
nature of much of Lessing's fiction and the fictionality and constructed
nature of Under My Skin, as well as her numerous interviews
and non-fiction works. Both her "self-representational"
works and her "autobiographical" works I consider to
be therefore, more therapeutic than confessional, although the
genres easily allow this also.

Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are dialogical and teleological
processes which probe an individual's past, past selves, memories
and mental states as do also many of Lessing's self-representational
texts, for example, The Memoirs of a Survivor which Lessing
sub-titled "An Attempt at Autobiography". Psychoanalysis
in particular can be valuable to literature both as a tool to
understanding texts, and as a metaphor for texts: self-representational
texts become a presentation of oneself in various guises, a search
for "truth", "answers", and a means of achieving
explication and purgation. H. Porter Abbott, for example, in Diary
Fiction Writing as Action, discusses the therapeutic nature
of much diary writing or self-representational writing, an argument
which I extend to include autobiography. He provides an examination
of Anna Wulf's diary writing in The Golden Notebook and
comments of Lessing that "part of [her] complex effort is
to erode the boundaries between writing and living one's life".(2)

Psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and self-representational
writing, all provide opportunities to reach the past, analyse
past experiences, and perhaps re-invent them by experiencing them
again, while living in the present. During a session with a psychoanalyst
or a psychotherapist, an individual endeavours to reconcile her
or his present feelings and existence with the past which she
or he may have suppressed. An act of self-representational writing
such as Lessing's resembles the relationship and situation created
between an analyst and analysand. Lessing occupies the position
of both while she is drafting, re-drafting, reading and re-reading
Under My Skin. She is able to recreate past selves and
commune in an inner dialogue with earlier and necessarily fictive
selves while constructing a coherent text that represents a healed
and unified self at a particular instant in time. Because an individual's
perception of her or his self is forever changing and the unconscious
realm is a dynamic one, the self-representational text is also
a historical artefact, and may be likened to on-going records
of therapy sessions. Under My Skin is a reference point
in Lessing's personal life. Perhaps she will use it as a basis
for Part Two of her autobiography, but she could just as easily
discard it, drafting instead a different "past".

Again, Lessing's autobiographical writing resembles a therapeutic
session because she invests herself with authority and distance
through the literary positioning of herself as "author".
She is able to exert power and command over the text while at
the same time allowing her own silent past to be re-created. Despite
Lessing's treatment of her younger "selves" as characters,
they do not survive within Under My Skin which revolves
around the Lessing of the present, although the development of
these characters, however partial, allows Lessing to provide another
perspective on her fictive past.

The process of self-representational writing enables Lessing
to sustain a dialogue with herself and her past in an attempt
to heal inner divisions and to create a unified self. While an
androcentric concept of "self", according to Sidonie
Smith, presents the self as unified and static, a theory of autobiography
that is flexible enough to validate an individual's construction
of "truth" and of themselves allows a dialogue between
the present "self" as conceived by the autobiographer
and past fictive selves. (3) Cora Agatucci provides a Bakhtinian
explanation:

The Diaries and their implied author may be conceptualised
in Bakhtinian terms as a new entry in the ongoing conversation
represented by Lessing's corpus, a confrontation with previous
authorial identities readers have constructed from her works,
an attempt to dialogise those conversations and reopen the debate.(4)

As Agatucci concludes, The Diaries is a deliberate meeting
of Lessing's identities and a construction of a new identity or
self. Paul John Eakin provides another explanation conceiving
"the autobiographical act [to be] as a re-enactment of a
certain drama".(5) Rather than defining an autobiographical
act as a "transparent record of an already completed self",
he suggests that it is "an integral and often decisive phase
of the drama of self-definition".(6) Such a definition, which
accords with my suggestion that an autobiographical text is similar
to a record of a therapy session, allows the reader to view autobiographical
texts existing over time and in different contexts, with different
tones and emphases, as steps or phases, in the move towards the
creation of an identity and "selfhood".

Psychoanalytic theory lends itself well to an examination
of self-representational writing not simply because it allows
a dialogic process to develop, a meeting of past and present,
but also because of the similarities between dreaming and self-representational
texts. Like an analyst, Lessing has drawn close links between
her use of dreams (which may involve meeting previous identities
or selves) as windows on to her daily life and as tools for resolving
artistic block. She holds the traditional nineteenth-century view
that writers "are the traditional interpreters of dreams
and nightmares".(7) Dreams have constantly played an important
role in both her personal and artistic life.(8)The prolific dream
life given to Martha Quest, Anna Wulf, Kate Brown and others,
including Charles Watkins who embarks on a dream voyage into his
inner space, illustrates the significance she attaches to dreams.

It is feasible to compare Lessing's Under My Skin
to dreaming, which is after all neither a "truthful"
nor "fictional" enterprise, because to my mind, dreams
at least partly construct any autobiographical work: dreams which
have either occurred in reality or which the autobiographer projects
on to the future. The act of dreaming is similar to self-representational
work because such a work creates a springboard from which to dive
into the rest of your life. The text becomes the dream-space in
which to re-live your life and relationships in the way that you
think you did or wished you had. The autobiographical act is a
result of pre-text. It arises from the autobiographer's
own life which occurs before the text and which the autobiographer
and the reader read as the text. The act of autobiography
also becomes the pre-text for the construction of a self-image
by the autobiographer and the reader, the latter reading the autobiographical
text while considering her or his own life-text. The self-conscious
and careful selection of events, people, and memories within an
autobiographical text either "fictive" or "deliberate"
re-orders the past and can generate more memories. Simultaneously,
however, the working of the unconscious violently warps and twists
the autobiographical texts from its author's plan.(9)

I argue that the act of writing about herself, and the resulting
construction of a self-image or images, can be for Lessing a form
of dreaming or wish-fulfilment. Wilson likewise argues: "So
we might turn the ambiguity of the relationship between fiction
and biography on its head, and instead of seeing fiction as a
reflection of reality, might prefer to see autobiography as equally
an ordering of the 'tentative unfinished' raw material of the
'real' in a metaphoric and symbolic creation of 'self'".(10)
An example of dreaming to re-create a past event more favourably
in Under My Skin is Lessing's re-telling of her experience
of a happy "rebirth" while under the influence of mescaline.
She says: "The actual birth was not only a bad one, but made
worse, by how it was repeated to me, so the story teller invented
a birth as the sun rose with light and warmth coming fast into
the enormous room".(11) The story teller is of course Lessing,
who in her autobiography deliberately draws comparisons between
stories and dreaming.

According to Lessing, dreaming, like writing, is creative
and she states: "The unconscious artist who resides in our
depths is a very economical individual. With a few symbols a dream
can define the whole of one's life and warn us of the future,
too".(12) In a similar way, a self-representational writer
condenses a text such as Under My Skin for personal reasons
and because of artistic constraints. While memories which a self-representational
writer such as Lessing recalls may not become part of the finished
text, they remain in the consciousness of daily life. Therefore,
an autobiographical work can be both a therapeutic and a learning
experience. An autobiography that refuses to adhere to the androcentric
model of a formal coherent construction will not develop as expected.
The act of self-representational writing involves delving into
one's past as an individual's memory constructs it, and it can
question the importance and relevance of whatever memory retrieves
from one's own history. As Lessing muses:

As you start to write at once the question begins to insist:
Why do you remember this and not that? Why do you remember in
every detail a whole week, month, more, of a long ago year, but
then complete dark, a blank? How do you know that what you remember
is more important than what you don't.(13)

Because the autobiographical act is a re-reading of one's
past, a recognition that is self-conscious and selective, it becomes
a re-vision, a re-writing of the past in the light of the present.
This applies whether it is "fictional" or "autobiographical",
distinctions which Lessing blurs. The Diaries of Jane Somers
is a re-vision of Lessing's own mother-daughter relationship,
re-imagined from the point of view of both as a daughter and a
mother. Jane, whom the reader may compare to both Lessing and
her mother Emily Maud Taylor, gradually comes to enter into an
emphatic and symbiotic relationship with Maudie. She learns to
act on her pity, opening herself up to the perspectives and emotions
of others and experiencing the painful rawness of her own loneliness
and closed-off emotional life. She acts in a way in which neither
Martha in Children of Violence nor Lessing herself does.
Jane reluctantly accepts the responsibilities of caring for Maudie
and her many emotional demands. As a result she learns to respond
to her own emotions and begins to nurture relationships with people
close to her. The principle of "You've helped me and now
I'll help You"(14) dominates the relationship, which develops
from a mother-daughter relationship fraught with conflict, self-denial,
complaints, and selfishness. Jane becomes a mother to Maudie and
later to her nieces Jill and Kate. By experiencing herself as
a mother to Maudie she is able to "deliver" her from
her life while "delivering" herself from her lonely
and sterile existence.

Through self-representational writing, Lessing, as Jane Somers,
is able to act on the pity she felt for her mother in life. Always
concerned to analyse and understand her past, she admits in Under
My Skin:

I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything,
and from the age of fourteen I set myself obdurately against her
in a kind of inner emigration from everything she represented
.... Now I see her as a tragic figure, living out her disappointing
years with courage and with dignity. I saw her then as tragic,
certainly, but was not able to be kind.(15)

Claire Sprague has suggested that Lessing's abrupt intrusion in
The Four-Gated City into the pathetic and lonely musings
of May Quest, at first un-named and therefore symbolically universal,
indicates a personal and writing difficulty.(16) Martha, disturbed
in her descent into her past and "self", is unable to
reconcile herself either to her mother or to the memories of the
past. The authorial intrusion is significant; it illustrates
the distance Martha still must travel in her past to be able to
live in her present and future, and it also forcefully demonstrates
the generational and psychological distance between mother and
daughter. The break in the novel's progress to allow such a complete
immersion into the mind of May Quest also suggests Lessing's growth
in sympathy and understanding towards her mother. Such a sympathy
Lessing acquires through aging and through becoming a mother
herself.

I shall use Lessing's self-representational texts to illustrate
such an evolving sense of selfhood. Lessing's parents for example,
are people she portrays differently within her texts. Her autobiographical
essay "My Father", written in 1963, provides a sense
of the terrible nostalgia and regret her father experiences for
his youth, that is, his life before the First World War. When
recalling the words of a fortune teller who had said he would
be lucky, he says:

I did not understand what she meant, but both times in the trenches,
first when my appendix burst and I nearly died, and then just
before Passchendaele, I felt for some days as if a thick, black
velvet pall was settled over me. I cannot tell you what it was
like. Oh, it was awful, awful, and the second time it was so bad
I wrote to the old people and told them I was going to be killed.(17)

This account, while fictionalised to an extent, allows Lessing
to come closer to the horror which her father experiences, and
to a recognition of her father's comment: "You should always
remember that sometimes pepla are all seething underneath. You
don't know what terrible things people have to fight against".(18)
Her writing about her father's trauma and his inability to forget,
which later sees him indulging in a haphazard and desperate way
in money making schemes such as gold mining and alchemy, means
that Lessing forces herself to face the realities of her father's
unhappiness, a condition which the young Martha in Children
of Violence refuses to acknowledge. Martha's irritation at
her father's pills, potions, and hypochondria, a feeling which
the growing Lessing shares, becomes gradually translated in Children
of Violence, into the understanding or pity which Lessing
acquires over time. Lessing says: "We use our parents like
recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed; they are always
there for love or for hate; but it occurs to me that I was not
always there for my father", a statement which she could
not have made had she not come to understand the impact of the
war on the psyches of individuals.(19) Her autobiographical essay,
is, I believe, a dream, or perhaps a nightmare, into which she
deliberately enters so as to be able to understand her father,
and so absorb his tragedy and unhappiness into her life in a more
positive way. Lessing's mother similarly obsesses her: she is
present in the characters of Mrs Quest, Jane Somers, Maudie Fowler,
and others. Lessing uses her autobiography Under My Skin
as a tool to understand her past, and to create a sense of calm
out of a whirlpool of emotions, adolescent tensions and rebellion
against her mother. She realises that: "For years I lived
in a state of accusation against my mother, at first hot, then
cold, and hard, and the pain, not to say anguish, was deep and
genuine. But now I ask myself, against what expectations, what
promises, was I watching what actually happened?".(20) Impertinent
Daughters and The Diaries of Jane Somers illustrate
Lessing's changing sense of selfhood, and both involve attempts
to view her mother through her mother's eyes, rather than through
the eyes of a rebellious adolescent, young wife or mother. All
of these viewpoints are no less legitimate or "truthful",
but simply present the truth from a different perspective, that
is, the truth of a younger and fictive self.

Lessing's creation and re-creation of fictive selves is similar
to Anna Wulf's moves towards individuation and the finding of
"self" through her self-representational writing in
The Golden Notebook. Of course, Anna is yet another example
of a fictive self. Anna, and so therefore, Lessing herself, is
linked to Virginia Woolf through her surname and her occupation
as a woman writer, alone and struggling to be independent. Like
Virginia Woolf, Anna is preoccupied with the process of writing,
the inability of writing to adequately convey experience, and
the unreliability of memory. Virginia Woolf in "A Sketch
of the Past" considers the way in which fiction resembles
psychoanalysis, a learning experience which is therapeutic, while
Anna Wulf comments that "literature is analysis after the
event".(21) Anna Wulf's different notebooks all contain different
selves through time, viewed from different angles. Likewise, Lessing's
self-representational writings, both "fictive" and "deliberate",
are examples of Lessing's conception of "self" at different
stages of her life and psychic development.

Therefore in conclusion, I suggest that Lessing's self-representational
writing is a form of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy which is
therapeutic and may involve wish-fulfilment or dreaming because
Lessing, uses the position of author to act as psychoanalyst and
character simultaneously. A dialogic process thus develops both
between Lessing as author and Lessing as character, and between
Lessing's fictive selves, which exist in a variety of self-representational
texts. Such an argument posits Lessing's sense of selfhood as
dialogical, teleological and evolving, as are the processes and
aims of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy.

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